God’s Eye View Turns Public Data Into a Spy-Movie Globe

God's Eye View is an open-source browser app that puts aircraft, ships, satellites, earthquakes and public cameras on one 3D globe. It looks like a surveillance-movie interface, but each layer comes from a different kind of data.

Image: Bilawal Sidhu, from the God's Eye View repository.

God's Eye View is maintained by Bilawal Sidhu and Sameh Khamis at Halfpixel. If you have played a flight sim or a tactical game, the look will be familiar: tracking markers, a dense HUD, and a camera that goes from the whole planet down to a single street. The signals behind it are real.

Where the data comes from

The 3D map is one thing and the activity drawn on it is another. Google describes its Photorealistic 3D Tiles as a textured 3D mesh, so buildings and terrain are geometry, not live video of what is happening below. On top of that, the project's data-source register lists OpenSky and adsb.lol for aircraft, AISStream for ships, CelesTrak for satellite orbital data and USGS for earthquakes.

Aircraft markers come from flight reports (OpenSky, adsb.lol), so coverage, update timing and missing data all apply.

Satellites are calculated positions, based on orbital elements and the SGP4 model, not a camera following the satellite.

Ships are positions reported through AIS via AISStream. That is not a full inventory of every vessel.

Street cameras show what one supported public camera sees, and availability and placement accuracy vary.

Cars on the roads are modeled traffic informed by aggregate data, so each rendered car is not an individually observed vehicle.

The thermal look is a rendering style, not a thermal measurement.

Sources: project documentation, data provenance, and CelesTrak on orbit determination.

Image: Bilawal Sidhu, from the God's Eye View repository.

Because the interface is smooth and consistent, every layer ends up looking equally precise on screen when they are not.

Why the movement looks smooth

The project's technical overview says live feeds come in every 15 to 30 seconds. The globe renders one interval behind real time and interpolates between known positions, with dead reckoning filling gaps. So smooth movement does not mean a fresh measurement for every frame. It makes a trajectory easier to read, but it is not a perfectly current observation.

Image: Bilawal Sidhu, from the God's Eye View repository.

For satellites, CelesTrak explains how orbital element sets and SGP4 produce expected positions and velocities. God's Eye View uses that kind of propagation to place them on the globe (source).

Image: Bilawal Sidhu, from the God's Eye View repository.

The thermal view is an effect

The project lists CRT, night-vision and FLIR-style looks among its GLSL visual effects (source). They change how the existing scene is drawn. They do not add a sensor. The cockpit view works the same way: it places a virtual camera with a tracked aircraft over mapped terrain. It is not a feed from inside the plane.

Image: Bilawal Sidhu, from the God's Eye View repository.

For a gaming audience, that is probably the best way to look at it. The project borrows the readability of a game interface to make real datasets easier to explore.

What runs underneath

The package manifest includes Cesium, Vite and satellite.js. The documentation describes a JavaScript app combining a globe renderer, source-specific data layers and server-side services. "Runs in your browser" therefore does not mean it works without external services. According to the security documentation, private credentials for services such as OpenAI, AISStream and OpenSky are handled by the local server, while some map-provider credentials are deliberately used client-side and need provider restrictions.

There is also a voice interface for navigation, layer controls and annotations (source). It turns a request into actions on the map. It does not make a stale or missing feed any more complete.

How to try it

The repository offers a Pinokio install and a terminal setup. When this was written, the terminal route required Node.js 24.14.0 or later in the 24.x line, or Node.js 26.x. The documented commands are:

git clone https://github.com/bilawalsidhu/gods-eye-view.git
cd gods-eye-view
npm ci
npm run doctor
npm run dev

Then open http://localhost:4173. These come from the official setup instructions. We have not tested the installation ourselves.

The project says it can start without API keys, but some features need them. Photorealistic 3D, certain data providers and the AI features have their own setup, quotas or billing, so read the Keys & Costs section before adding credentials. For a first look, try one layer at a time and ask whether what you see is observed, calculated or simulated.

Licensing

The MIT license covers the source code, not every dataset or image the app displays. Third-party imagery, models and data keep their own terms, and the project's promotional GIFs have separate media permissions.

What makes God's Eye View interesting is the shared interface: you move between signals, places and sources without losing your place on the map.

Sources and further reading: repository, data sources, security model, license, Google Photorealistic 3D Tiles, CelesTrak. Checked on 22 October 2026 against repository commit 7be5937.